Basu: I'm feeling duped by the president's reversals

Jun. 7, 2013

President Barack Obama gestures while speaking in San Jose, Calif. , Friday, June 7, 2013. The president defended his government's secret surveillance, saying Congress has repeatedly authorized the collection of America's phone records and U.S. internet use. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) / AP

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Four years ago, addressing graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy, the president said he had been to visit the National Archives where the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are housed.

“I went there because as our national debate on how to deal with the security challenges that we face proceeds,” Barack Obama said, “we must remember this enduring truth: The values and ideals in those documents are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the bedrock of our liberty and our security.”

In that speech, the president famously decried “the false choice between our security and our ideals.” He said, “We can and we must and we will protect both.”

As we now know, Obama did not. Under his presidency, the FBI and National Security Agency have been authorized to collect all the phone numbers dialed by Verizon customers and those of other phone companies under secret orders granted every three months by a secret court. Internet communications via Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and more have been tracked, at least between people here and abroad. Since many of my Facebook friends and family live abroad, I’ll assume mine are among them. If you’re reading this on Facebook, that could put you in the loop, too.

These disclosures, which began last week in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, have left some longtime Obama supporters wondering how to feel about a president who criticized his predecessor for the intrusive, undemocratic Patriot Act yet renewed and expanded some of its provisions. Some want to give him the benefit of the doubt, suggesting perhaps it shouldn’t matter that phone records are being logged if they are doing nothing illegal and if those help foil terrorist plots.

But we are left to take it on faith that casting such a broad net is an efficient way to catch terrorists that preserves privacy. As Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., put it, “The American public can’t be kept in the dark about the basic architecture of the programs designed to protect them.”

Here’s the real heartbreak for many who took Obama’s rhetoric to heart and turned out for him in droves: The same president who exhorted Americans to be active participants in democracy and to hold their government accountable now seems to be telling us that how decisions are made is none of our business. The idealist who eloquently spoke of how the process matters now seems to be saying the ends justify the means.

Did Obama really believe what he said at the time and then succumb to bad advice, or lose the backbone to fight? Was it political inexperience? Or did he just use those poetic words to get elected?

“We uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to, but because we swear to,” he told the Naval Academy graduates that day. “Not because they feel good, but because they help keep us safe. They keep us true to who we are.”

But who we are really? We are a nation that holds prisoners abroad for 11 years without charges or trials, tortures them and then, when they try to exercise the last bit of power they have over their lives by foregoing food, force-feeds them.

We are a nation that targets and kills a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in secrecy.

We are a nation that secretly seizes phone records of reporters to track the source of press leaks, and one that targets groups with different political views than the administration’s for greater Internal Revenue Service scrutiny.

We are a nation that puts out misinformation about what it has done or is doing. Osama bin Laden, it turns out, did not put up a fight, as first reported, when Navy SEALS raided his compound and shot and killed him. What we heard was a concocted story.

Truth and process matter. Didn’t the old Obama say so? “Because when America strays from our values, it not only undermines the rule of law, it alienates us from our allies,” he said, “it energizes our adversaries and it endangers our national security and the lives of our troops.”

Obama’s priorities on health care, taxation, the minimum wage, women’s rights, gun control and other issues still distinguish him, for me, in positive ways from his predecessor. Legislatively, he has been stymied too often by an obstructionist Congress.

But he now stands responsible for doing just what he accused GOP opponents of: sacrificing democracy in the name of fighting terrorism. As one believed in Obama not just for his policy positions, but for inspiring us to envision a better America, I can’t help feeling duped by his embrace of the same old tactics.